Some of us play games to test our abilities, earn high scores, achieve objectives, and, ultimately, win in some way. Others play to experience a story, immerse themselves in a fictional world, and pretend to be someone else for a while. And there are those who play for less traditional reasons. Their primary aim may be to enjoy interactive art and music, experience the satisfaction of virtual discovery, or perhaps even meditate.

It’s this last group at which Honeyslug’s charming, beautiful, explorative Hohokum is squarely targeted. And it largely succeeds. The only time it stumbles is when it makes a half-hearted attempt to appease those other groups.

Hohokum‘s protagonist is a thin, flowing, snake-like being tipped with a single eye. This creature – known as the Long Mover – streams along flat and colourful two-dimensional environments, its direction controlled by a pair of triggers or a thumbstick, whichever you prefer. You can speed up its movement or slow it down to a crawl using the X and square buttons.

That’s about all there is to the interface, which you’ll figure out mostly through experimentation. And there are no instructions or hints as to what to do once you have a handle on the controls. Players are meant to explore and discover how the world reacts to their actions.

At times it feels like play in the purest, most child-like sense of the word; we’re engaging in an activity for the sole purpose of enjoyment and the satisfaction of our curiosity. What happens if the Long Mover bumps into a mushroom on a floating tree? Streams past tiny people on a platform? Flows over a series of loosely strung elastic bands? Rams into a bisected sphere? Zooms over a field of blank white circles?

Each area is filled with these basic, natural, human questions. And the answers – which include wonderful bursts of kaleidoscopic colours and a dynamic musical score – are often meant to be rewards in and of themselves. It’s a bit like how a two-month-old is delighted when he or she discovers the physical effects of batting around the bright objects that hang from a baby gym.

But don’t mistake that to mean that this is a game for young children. The visual and auditory wonders on display in Hohokum are deeply imaginative and perpetually changing. This is interactive art capable of being appreciated on multiple levels by adult minds.

It’s a lovely experience. But where it occasionally falters is in introducing more traditional objectives that bring the experience closer to being a typical game.

Amid all of the discovery and freeform play you’ll frequently realize that there’s something that actually needs to be done in order to progress the game’s simple story, which involves reuniting the Long Mover with some of its similarly skinny-bodied pals.

The problem is that you don’t know what you might need to do or where you need to do it to make one of these creatures appear. I never knew if I was leaving one of the Long Mover’s friends behind by not exploring an area fully enough, not making the Long Mover move over the exact right chunk of the environment to set off a necessary event.

Consequently, I ended up spending excessive time in areas in which there was nothing left to discover. I searched in vain for some unknown thing that, it often turned turns out, just wasn’t there. A simple visual indicator of some kind that denoted I was in a place where one of the Long Mover’s friends was hanging out would have gone a long way toward keeping me from worrying about abandoning an area with a narrative-critical secret left undiscovered.

Hohokum feels as though it wants to transcend the medium of games to become a work of interactive art, something to be experienced rather than beaten. And in many ways it succeeds. The game can be played with little regard for objectives, appreciated purely for the discoveries you make, the things you see, the music you hear and help to create.

But once I had the sense that there were specific things to be done in order to achieve goals, that became my focus, and the magic of the experience suffered for it. The sense of wonder I had with each new discovery was tempered by the logical part of my brain, which began looking for problems to solve and working out plans. I fretted that I was failing to trigger important events. And this concern lessened my ability to simply sit back and enjoy the act of play.

Hohokum still earns an easy recommendation for anyone looking for a game that steps outside the box. It’s just too bad it’s left one foot inside.